Value Theory

The term “value theory” is used in at least three
different ways in philosophy. In its broadest sense, “value
theory” is a catch-all label used to encompass all branches of
moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and
sometimes feminist philosophy and the philosophy of religion —
whatever areas of philosophy are deemed to encompass some
“evaluative” aspect. In its narrowest sense, “value
theory” is used for a relatively narrow area of normative
ethical theory particularly, but not exclusively, of concern to consequentialists. In this
narrow sense, “value theory” is roughly synonymous with
“axiology”. Axiology can be thought of as primarily
concerned with classifying what things are good, and how good they
are. For instance, a traditional question of axiology concerns
whether the objects of value are subjective psychological states, or
objective states of the world.

But in a more useful sense, “value theory” designates the
area of moral philosophy that is concerned with theoretical questions
about value and goodness of all varieties — the theory of value.
The theory of value, so construed, encompasses axiology, but also
includes many other questions about the nature of value and its
relation to other moral categories. The division of moral theory into
the theory of value, as contrasting with other areas of investigation,
cross-cuts the traditional classification of moral theory into
normative and metaethical inquiry, but is a worthy distinction in its
own right; theoretical questions about value constitute a core domain
of interest in moral theory, often cross the boundaries between the
normative and the metaethical, and have a distinguished history of
investigation. This article surveys a range of the questions which
come up in the theory of value, and attempts to impose some structure
on the terrain by including some observations about how they are
related to one another.

The theory of value begins with a subject matter. It is hard to
specify in some general way exactly what counts, but it certainly
includes what we are talking about when we say any of the following
sorts of things:

“pleasure is good/bad”; “it would be
good/bad if you did that”; “she is good/bad for
him”; “too much cholesterol is good/bad for your
health”; “that is a good/bad knife”; “Jack is
a good/bad thief”; “he's a good/bad man”;
“it's good/bad that you came”; “it would be
better/worse if you didn't”; “lettuce is better/worse for
you than Oreos”; “my new can opener is better/worse than
my old one”; “Mack is a better/worse thief than
Jack”; “it's better/worse for it to end now, than for us
to get caught later”; “best/worst of all, would be if they
won the World Series and kept all of their players for next
year”; “celery is the best/worst thing for your
health”; “Mack is the best/worst thief
around”

The word “value” doesn't appear anywhere on this list; it
is full, however, of “good”, “better”, and
“best”, and correspondingly of “bad”,
“worse”, and “worst”. And these words are
used in a number of different kinds of constructions, of which we may
take these four to be the main exemplars:

Pleasure is good.

It is good that you came.

She is good for him.

That is a good knife.

Sentences like 1, in which “good” is predicated of a mass
term, constitute a central part of traditional axiology, in which
philosophers have wanted to know what things (of which there can be
more or less) are good. I'll stipulatively call them value claims,
and use the word “stuff” for the kind of thing of which
they predicate value (like pleasure, knowledge, and money). Sentences
like 2 make claims about what I'll (again stipulatively) call goodness
simpliciter; this is the kind of goodness appealed to by
traditional utilitarianism. Sentences like 3 are good for
sentences, and when the subject following “for” is a
person, we usually take them to be claims about welfare or well-being.
And sentences like 4 are what, following Geach [1960], I'll call
attributive uses of “good”, because
“good” functions as a predicate modifier, rather than as a
predicate in its own right.

Many of the basic issues in the theory of value begin with questions
or assumptions about how these various kinds of claim are related to
one another. Some of these are introduced in the next two sections,
focusing in 1.1 on the relationship between our four kinds of
sentences, and focusing in 1.2 on the relationship between
“good” and “better”, and between
“good” and “bad”.

Claims about good simpliciter are those which have garnered the
most attention in moral philosophy. This is partly because as it is
usually understood, these are the “good” claims that
consequentialists hold to have a bearing on what we ought to do.
Consequentialism, so understood, is the view that you ought to do
whatever action is such that things would be best if you did it. This
leaves, however, a wide variety of possible theories about how such
claims are related to other kinds of “good” claim.

1.1.1 Good Simpliciter and Good For

For example, consider a simple point of view theory, according
to which what is good simpliciter differs from what is good for
Jack, in that being good for Jack is being good from a certain point
of view — Jack's — whereas being good simpliciter
is being good from a more general point of view — the point of
view of the universe. The point of view theory reduces both good
for and good simpliciter to good from the point of view
of, and understands good simpliciter claims as about the
point of view of the universe. One problem for this view is to make
sense of what sort of thing points of view could be, such that Jack
and the universe are both the kinds of thing to have one.

According to a different sort of theory, the agglomerative
theory, goodness simpliciter is just what you get by
“adding up” what is good for all of the various people
that there are. Rawls seems to attribute this view to utilitarians,
but much more work would have to be done in order to make it precise.
We sometimes say things like, “wearing that outfit in the sun
all day is not going to be good for your tan line”, but your tan
line is not one of the things whose good it seems plausible to
“add up” in order to get what is good simpliciter.
Certainly it is not one of the things whose good classical
utilitarians would want to add up. So the fact that sapient and even
sentient beings are not the only kinds of thing that things can be
good or bad for sets an important constraint both on accounts of the
good for relation, and on theories about how it is related to
good simpliciter.

In his refutation of egoism, G.E. Moore attributed the converse theory
to egoists — that what is good for Jack (or “in Jack's
good”) is just what is good and in Jack's possession, or
alternatively, what it is good that Jack possesses. Moore didn't
argue against these theses directly, but he did show that they cannot
be combined with universalizable egoism. It is now generally
recognized that to avoid Moore's arguments, egoists need only to
reject these analyses of good for.

1.1.2 Attributive Good

Other kinds of views understand good simpliciter in terms of
attributive good. What, after all, are the kinds of things to which
we attribute goodness simpliciter? According to many
philosophers, it is to propositions, or states of affairs. This is
supported by a cursory study of the examples we have considered, in
which what is being said to be good appears to be picked out by
complementizers like “if”, “that”, and
“for”: “it would be good if you did that”;
“it's good that you came”; “it's better for it to
end now”. If complementizer phrases denote propositions or
possible states of affairs, then it is reasonable to conjecture that being
good simpliciter is being a good state of affairs, and hence
that it is a special case of attributive good.

for further complications that arise when we consider the attributive
sense of “good”.

A number of philosophers have denied that there is any such thing as
goodness simpliciter, and it has sometimes been argued that
this whole way of talking is an invention of utilitarian moral
philosophers. Peter Geach, for example, insists that apparent good
simpliciter sentences are really simply elliptical attributive
good sentences, and Judith Jarvis Thomson has argued that they are
really simply elliptical good for sentences. Both Geach and
Thomson seek to undermine consequentialist theories by denying them a
subject matter. This strategy is problematic, however. For example,
suppose that Geach is right, but only because the last-mentioned
theory is correct, and being good simpliciter is just being a
good state of affairs. Then consequentialists can still have their subject
matter — it simply turns out to be a special case of the more
general phenomenon of attributive good.

Other philosophers have used the examples of attributive good and
good for in order to advance arguments against noncognitivist
metaethical theories (See the entry
cognitivism and non-cognitivism).
The basic outlines of such an argument go like this: noncognitivist
theories are designed to deal with good simpliciter, but have
some kind of difficulties accounting for attributive good or for
good for. Hence, there is a general problem with
noncognitivist theories, or at least a significant lacuna they leave.
It has similarly been worried that noncognitivist theories will have
problems accounting for so-called “agent-relative” value
[see section 4], again, apparently, because of its relational nature.
There is no place to consider this claim here, but note that it would
be surprising if relational uses of “good” like these were
in fact a deep or special problem for noncognitivism; Hare's account
in The Language of Morals was specifically about attributive
uses of “good”, and it is not clear why relational
noncognitive attitudes should be harder to make sense of than
relational beliefs.

1.1.3 Relational Strategies

In an extension of the strategies just discussed, some theorists have
proposed views of “good” which aspire to treat all of good
simpliciter, good for, and attributive good as special
cases. A paradigm of this approach is the
“end-relational” theory of Paul Ziff and Stephen Finlay.
According to Ziff, all claims about goodness are relative to ends or
purposes, and “good for” and attributive
“good” sentences are simply different ways of making these
purposes (more or less) explicit. Talk about what is good for Jack,
for example, makes the purpose of Jack's being happy (say) explicit,
while talk about what is a good knife makes our usual purposes for
knives (cutting things, say) explicit. The claim about goodness is
then relativized accordingly.

Views adopting this strategy need to develop in detail answers to just
what, exactly, the further, relational, parameter on
“good” is. Some hold that it is ends, while others
say things like “aims”. A filled-out version of this view
must also be able to tell us the mechanics of how these ends
can be made explicit in “good for” and attributive
“good” claims, and needs to really make sense of both of
those kinds of claim as of one very general kind. And, of course,
this sort of view yields the prediction that non-explicitly
relativized “good” sentences — including those used
throughout moral philosophy — are really only true or false once
the end parameter is specified, perhaps by context.

This means that this view is open to the objection that it fails to
account for a central class of uses of “good” in ethics,
which by all evidence are non-relative, and for which the
linguistic data do not support the hypothesis that they are
context-sensitive. J.L. Mackie held a view like this one and embraced
this result — Mackie's [1977] error theory about
“good” extended only to such putative non-relational
senses of “good”. Though he grants that there are such
uses of “good”, Mackie concludes that they are mistaken.
Finlay [2004], in contrast, argues that he can use ordinary pragmatic
effects in order to explain the appearances. The apparently
non-relational senses of “good”, Finlay argues, really are
relational, and his theory aspires to explain why they seem
otherwise.

1.1.4 What's Special About Value Claims

The sentences I have called “value claims” present special
complications. Unlike the other sorts of “good”
sentences, they do not appear to admit, in a natural way, of
comparisons. Suppose, for example, with G.E. Moore, that pleasure is
good and knowledge is good. Which, we might ask, is better? This
question does not appear to make very much sense, until we fix on some
amount of pleasure and some amount of knowledge. But if
Sue is a good dancer and Huw is a good dancer, then it makes perfect
sense to ask who is the better dancer, and without needing to fix on
any particular amount of dancing — much less on any
amount of Sue or Huw. In general, just as the kinds of thing that can
be tall are the same kinds of thing as can be taller than each other,
the kinds of thing that can be good are the same kinds of thing as can
be better than one another. But the sentences that we are
calling “value claims”, which predicate “good”
of some stuff, appear not to be like this.

One possible response to this observation, if it is taken seriously,
is to conclude that so-called “value claims” have a
different kind of logical form or structure. One way of implementing
this idea, the good-first theory, is to suppose that
“pleasure is good” means something roughly like,
“(other things equal) it is better for there to be more
pleasure”, rather than, “pleasure is better than most
things (in some relevant comparison class)”, on a model with
“Sue is a good dancer”, which means roughly, “Sue is
a better dancer than most (in some relevant comparison class)”.
According to a very different kind of theory, the value-first
theory, when we say that pleasure is good, we are saying that pleasure
is a value, and things are better just in case there is more of the
things which are values. These two theories offer competing orders of
explanation for the same phenomenon. The good-first theory analyzes
value claims in terms of “good” simpliciter, while the
value-first theory analyzes “good” simpliciter in
terms of value claims. The good-first theory corresponds to the
thesis that states of affairs are the “primary bearers” of
value; the value-first theory corresponds to the alternative thesis
that it is things like pleasure or goodness (or perhaps their
instances) that are the “primary bearers” of value.

1.2.1 Good and Better

On a natural view, the relationship between “good”,
“better”, and “best” would seem to be the same
as that between “tall”, “taller”, and
“tallest”. “Tall” is a gradable adjective,
and “taller” is its comparative form. On standard views,
gradable adjectives are analyzed in terms of their comparative form.
At bottom is the relation of being taller than, and someone is
the tallest woman, just in case she is taller than every woman.
Similarly, someone is tall, just in case she is taller than a
contextually appropriate standard, or taller than sufficiently many
(this many be vague) in some contextually appropriate comparison
class.

Much moral philosophy appears to assume that things are very different
for “good”, “better”, and “best”.
Instead of treating “better than” as basic, and something
as being good just in case it is better than sufficiently many in some
comparison class, philosophers very often assume, or write as if they
assume, that “good” is basic. For example, many theorists
have proposed analyses of what it is to be good, which are
incompatible with the claim that “good” is to be
understood in terms of “better”. In the absence of some
reason to think that “good” is very different from
“tall”, however, this may be a very peculiar kind of claim
to make, and it may distort some other issues in the theory of
value.

1.2.2 Value

Moreover, it is difficult to see how one could do things the other way
around, and understand “better” in terms of
“good”. Jon is a better sprinter than Jan not because it
is more the case that Jon is a good sprinter than that Jan is a good
sprinter — they are both excellent sprinters, so neither one of
these is more the case than the other. It is, however, possible to
see how to understand both “good” and “better”
in terms of value. If good is to better as tall is to taller, then
the analogue of value should intuitively be height. One person is
taller than another just in case her height is greater; similarly, one
state of affairs is better than another just in case its value is
greater. If we postulate something called “value” to play
this role, then it is natural (though not obligatory) to identify
value with amounts of values — amounts of things like
pleasure or knowledge, which “value” claims claim to be
good.

But this move appears to be implausible or unnecessary when applied to
attributive “good”. It is not particularly plausible that
there is such a thing as can-opener value, such that one can-opener is
better than another just in case it has more can-opener value. In
general, not all comparatives need be analyzable in terms of something
like height, of which there can be literally more or less. Take, for
example, the case of “scary”. The analogy with height
would yield the prediction that if one horror film is scarier than
another, it is because it has more of something — scariness
— than the other. This may be right, but it is not obviously
so. If it is not, then the analogy need not hold for
“good” and its cognates, either. In this case, it may be
that being better than does not merely amount to having more value
than.

1.2.3 Good and Bad

These questions, moreover, are related to others. For example,
“better” would appear to be the inverse relation of
“worse”. A is better than B just in case B is worse than
A. So if “good” is just “better than sufficiently
many” and “bad” is just “worse than
sufficiently many”, all of the interesting facts in the
neighborhood would seem to be captured by an assessment of what stands
in the better than relation to what. The same point goes if to
be good is just to be better than a contextually set standard. But it
has been held by many moral philosophers that an inventory of what is
better than what would still leave something interesting and important
out: what is
good.

If this is right, then it is one important motivation for denying that
“good” can be understood in terms of “better”. But it is
important to be careful about this kind of argument. Suppose, for
example, that, as is commonly held about “tall”, the
relevant comparison class or standard for “good” is somehow supplied
by the context of utterance. Then to know whether “that is
good” is true, you do need to know more than all of the
facts about what is better than what — you also need to know
something about the comparison class that is supplied by the context
of utterance. The assumption that “good” is
context-dependent in this way may therefore itself be just the kind of
thing to explain the intuition which drives the preceding
argument.

Traditional axiology seeks to investigate what things are good, how
good they are, and how their goodness is related to one another.
Whatever we take the “primary bearers” of value to be, one
of the central questions of traditional axiology is that of what
stuffs are good: what is of value.

2.1.1 What is Intrinsic Value?

Of course, the central question philosophers have been interested in,
is that of what is of intrinsic value, which is taken to
contrast with instrumental value. Paradigmatically, money is
supposed to be good, but not intrinsically good: it is supposed to be
good because it leads to other good things: HD TV's and houses in
desirable school districts and vanilla lattes, for example. These
things, in turn, may only be good for what they lead to: exciting NFL
Sundays and adequate educations and caffeine highs, for example. And
those things, in turn, may be good only for what they lead to, but
eventually, it is argued, something must be good, and not just for
what it leads to. Such things are said to be intrinsically
good.

Philosophers' adoption of the term “intrinsic” for this
distinction reflects a common theory, according to which whatever is
non-instrumentally good must be good in virtue of its intrinsic
properties. This idea is supported by a natural argument: if
something is good only because it is related to something else, the
argument goes, then it must be its relation to the other thing that is
non-instrumentally good, and the thing itself is good only because it
is needed in order to obtain this relation. The premise in this
argument is highly controversial, and in fact many philosophers
believe that something can be non-instrumentally good in virtue of its
relation to something else. Consequently, sometimes the term
“intrinsic” is reserved for what is good in virtue of its
intrinsic properties, or for the view that goodness itself is
an intrinsic property, and non-instrumental value is instead called
“telic” or “final”. I'll stick to
“intrinsic”, but keep in mind that intrinsic goodness may
not be an intrinsic property, and that what is intrinsically good may
turn out not to be so in virtue of its intrinsic properties.

for further discussion of the implications of the assumption that
intrinsic value supervenes on intrinsic properties.

Instrumental value is also sometimes contrasted with
“constitutive” value. The idea behind this distinction is
that instrumental values lead causally to intrinsic values,
while constitutive values amount to intrinsic values. For
example, my giving you money, or a latte, may causally result in your
experiencing pleasure, whereas your experiencing pleasure may
constitute, without causing, your being happy. For many
purposes this distinction is not very important, and constitutive
values can be thought, along with instrumental values, as things that
are ways of getting something of intrinsic value. I'll use
“instrumental” in a broad sense, to include such values.

2.1.2 What is the Intrinsic/Instrumental Distinction Among?

I have assumed, here, that the intrinsic/instrumental distinction is
among what I have been calling “value claims”, such as
“pleasure is good”, rather than among one of the other
kinds of uses of “good” from part 1. It does not make
sense, for example, to say that something is a good can opener, but
only instrumentally, or that Sue is a good dancer, but only
instrumentally. Perhaps it does make sense to say that vitamins are
good for Jack, but only instrumentally; if that is right, then the
instrumental/intrinsic distinction will be more general, and it may
tell us something about the structure of and relationship between the
different senses of “good”, to look at which uses of
“good” allow an intrinsic/instrumental distinction.

It is sometimes said that consequentialists, since they appeal to
claims about what is good simpliciter in their explanatory
theories, are committed to holding that states of affairs are the
“primary” bearers of value, and hence are the only things
of intrinsic value. This is not right. First, consequentialists can
appeal in their explanatory moral theory to facts about what state of
affairs would be best, without holding that states of affairs are the
“primary” bearers of value; instead of having a
“good-first” theory, they may have a
“value-first” theory (see section 1.1.4), according to
which states of affairs are good or bad in virtue of there
being more things of value in them. Moreover, even those who take a
“good-first” theory are not really committed to holding
that it is states of affairs that are intrinsically valuable; states
of affairs are not, after all, something that you can collect more or
less of. So they are not really in parallel to pleasure or
knowledge.

One of the oldest questions in the theory of value is that of whether
there is more than one fundamental (intrinsic) value. Monists say
“no”, and pluralists say “yes”. This question
only makes sense as a question about intrinsic values; clearly there
is more than one instrumental value, and monists and pluralists will
disagree, in many cases, not over whether something is of value, but
over whether its value is intrinsic. For example, as important
as he held the value of knowledge to be, Mill was committed to holding
that its value is instrumental, not intrinsic. G.E. Moore disagreed,
holding that knowledge is indeed a value, but an intrinsic one, and
this expanded Moore's list of basic values. Mill's theory famously
has a pluralistic element as well, in contrast with Bentham's, but
whether Mill properly counts as a pluralist about value depends on
whether his view was that there is only one value — happiness
— but two different kinds of pleasure which contribute to it,
one more effectively than the other, or whether his view was that each
kind of pleasure is a distinctive value. This point will be important
in what follows.

2.2.1 Ontology and Explanation

At least three quite different sorts of issues are at stake in this
debate. First is an ontological/explanatory issue. Some monists have
held that a plural list of values would be explanatorily
unsatisfactory. If pleasure and knowledge are both values, they have
held, there remains a further question to be asked: why? If this
question has an answer, some have thought, it must be because there is
a further, more basic, value under which the explanation subsumes both
pleasure and knowledge. Hence, pluralist theories are either
explanatorily inadequate, or have not really located the basic
intrinsic values.

This argument relies on a highly controversial principle about how an
explanation of why something is a value must work — a very
similar principle to that which was appealed to in the argument that
intrinsic value must be an intrinsic property [section 2.1.1]. If
this principle is false, then an explanatory theory of why both
pleasure and knowledge are values can be offered which does not work
by subsuming them under a further, more fundamental value. Reductive
theories of what it is to be a value satisfy this description,
and other kinds of theory may do so, as well. If one of these kinds
of theory is correct, then even pluralists can offer an explanation of
why the basic values that they appeal to are values.

2.2.2 Revisionary Commitments?

Moreover, against the monist, the pluralist can argue that the basic
posits to which her theory appeals are not different in kind
from those to which the monist appeals; they are only different in
number. This leads to the second major issue that is at stake
in the debate between monists and pluralists. Monistic theories carry
strong implications about what is of value. Given any monistic
theory, everything that is of value must be either the one intrinsic
value, or else must lead to the one intrinsic value. This means that
if some things that are intuitively of value, such as knowledge, do
not, in fact, always lead to what a theory holds to be the one
intrinsic value (for example, pleasure), then the theory is committed
to denying that these things are really always of value after all.

Confronted with these kinds of difficulties in subsuming everything
that is pre-theoretically of value under one master value, pluralists
don't fret: they simply add to their list of basic intrinsic values,
and hence can be more confident in preserving the pre-theoretical
phenomena. Monists, in contrast, have a choice. They can change
their mind about the basic intrinsic value and try all over again,
they can work on developing resourceful arguments that knowledge
really does lead to pleasure, or they can bite the bullet and conclude
that knowledge is really not, after all, always good, but only under
certain specific conditions. If the explanatory commitments of the
pluralist are not different in kind from those of the monist,
but only different in number, then it is natural for the
pluralist to think that this kind of slavish adherence to the number
one is a kind of fetish it is better to do without, if we want to
develop a theory that gets things right. This is a perspective
that many historical pluralists have shared.

2.2.3 Incommensurability

The third important issue in the debate between monists and
pluralists, and the most central over recent decades, is that over the
relationship between pluralism and incommensurability. If one state
of affairs is better than another just in case it contains more value
than the other, and there are two or more basic intrinsic values, then
it is not clear how two states of affairs can be compared, if one
contains more of the first value, but the other contains more of the
second. Which state of affairs is better, under such a circumstance?
In contrast, if there is only one intrinsic value, then this can't
happen: the state of affairs that is better is the one that has more
of the basic intrinsic value, whatever that is.

Reasoning like this has led some philosophers to believe that
pluralism is the key to explaining the complexity of real moral
situations and the genuine tradeoffs that they involve. If some
things really are incomparable or incommensurable, they reason,
then pluralism about value could explain why. Very similar
reasoning has led other philosophers, however, to the view that
monism has to be right: practical wisdom requires being able to
make choices, even in complicated situations, they argue. But that
would be impossible, if the options available in some choice were
incomparable in this way. So if pluralism leads to this kind of
incomparability, then pluralism must be false.

In the next section, we'll consider the debate over the comparability
of values on which this question hinges. But even if we grant all of
the assumptions on both sides so far, monists have the better of these
two arguments. Value pluralism may be one way to obtain
incomparable options, but there could be other ways, even consistently
with value monism. For example, take the interpretation of Mill on
which he believes that there is only one intrinsic value —
happiness — but that happiness is a complicated sort of thing,
which can happen in each of two different ways — either through
higher pleasures, or through lower pleasures. If Mill has this view,
and holds, further, that it is in some cases indeterminate whether
someone who has slightly more higher pleasures is happier than
someone who has quite a few more lower pleasures, then he can
explain why it is indeterminate whether it is better to be the first
way or the second way, without having to appeal to pluralism in his
theory of value. The pluralism would be within his theory of
happiness alone.

We have just seen that one of the issues at stake in the debate
between monists and pluralists about value turns on the question
(vaguely put) of whether values can be incomparable or
incommensurable. This is consequently an area of active dispute in
its own right. There are, in fact, many distinct issues in this
debate, and sometimes several of them are run together.

2.3.1 Is there Weak Incomparability?

One of the most important questions at stake is whether it must always
be true, for two states of affairs, that things would be better if the
first obtained than if the second did, that things would be better if
the second obtained than if the first did, or that things would be
equally good if either obtained. The claim that it can sometimes
happen that none of these is true is sometimes referred to as the
claim of incomparability, in this case as applied to good
simpliciter. Ruth Chang [2002] has argued that in addition to
“better than”, “worse than”, and
“equally good”, there is a fourth “positive value
relation”, which she calls parity. Chang reserves the
use of “incomparable” to apply more narrowly, to the
possibility that in addition to none of the other three relations
holding between them, it is possible that two states of affairs may
fail even to be “on a par”. However, we can distinguish
between weak incomparability, defined as above,
and strong incomparability, further requiring the lack of
parity, whatever that turns out to be. Since the notion
of parity is itself a theoretical idea about how to account for
what happens when the other three relations fail to obtain, a question
which I won't pursue here, it will be weak incomparability that will
interest us here.

It is important to distinguish the question of whether good
simpliciter admits of incomparability from the question of
whether good for and attributive good admit of incomparability.
Many discussions of the incomparability of values proceed at a very
abstract level, and interchange examples of each of these kinds of
value claims. For example, a typical example of a purported
incomparability might compare, say, Mozart to Rodin. Is Mozart a
better artist than Rodin? Is Rodin a better artist than Mozart? Are
they equally good? If none of these is the case, then we have an
example of incomparability in attributive good, but not an example of
incomparability in good simpliciter. These questions may be
parallel or closely related, and investigation of each may be
instructive in consideration of the other, but they still need to be
kept separate.

For example, one important argument against the incomparability of
value was mentioned in the previous section. It is that
incomparability would rule out the possibility of practical wisdom,
because practical wisdom requires the ability to make correct choices
even in complicated choice situations. Choices are presumably between
actions, or between possible consequences of those actions. So it
could be that attributive good is sometimes incomparable, because
neither Mozart nor Rodin is a better artist than the other and they
are not equally good, but that good simpliciter is always
comparable, so that there is always an answer as to which of two
actions would lead to an outcome that is better.

2.3.2 What Happens when there is Weak Incomparability?

Even once it is agreed that good simpliciter is incomparable in
this sense, many theories have been offered as to what that
incomparability involves and why it exists. One important constraint
on such theories is that they not predict more incomparabilities than
we really observe. For example, though Rodin may not be a better or
worse artist than Mozart, nor equally good, he is certainly a better
artist than Salieri — even though Salieri, like Mozart, is a
better composer than Rodin. This is a problem for the idea that
incomparability can be explained by value pluralism. The argument
from value pluralism to incomparability suggested that
it would be impossible to compare any two states of affairs where one
contained more of one basic value and the other contained more of
another. But cases like that of Rodin and Salieri show that the
explanation of what is incomparable between Rodin and Mozart can't
simply be that since Rodin is a better sculptor and Mozart is a better
composer, there is no way of settling who is the better artist. If
that were the correct explanation, then Rodin and Salieri would also
be incomparable, but intuitively, they are not. Constraints like
these can narrow down the viable theories about what is going on in
cases of incomparability, and are evidence that
incomparability is probably not going to be straightforwardly
explained by value pluralism.

There are many other kinds of theses that go under the title of the
incomparability or incommensurability of values. For example, some
theories which posit lexical orderings are said to commit to
“incomparabilities”. Kant's thesis that rational agents
have a dignity and not a price is often taken to be a thesis about a
kind of incommensurability, as well. Some have interpreted Kant to be
holding simply that respect for rational agents is of infinite value,
or that it is to be lexically ordered over the value of anything else.
Another thesis in the neighborhood, however, would be somewhat weaker.
It might be that a human life is “above price” in the
sense that killing one to save one is not an acceptable exchange, but
that for some positive value of n, killing one to save n
would be an acceptable exchange. On this view, there is no single
“exchange value” for a life, because the value of a human
life depends on whether you are “buying” or
“selling” — it is higher when you are going to take
it away, but lower when you are going to preserve it. Such a view
would intelligibly
count as a kind of “incommensurability”, because it sets
no single value on human lives.

A more detailed discussion of the commensurability
of values can be found in the entry on
incommensurable values.

One of the biggest and most important questions about value is the
matter of its relation to the deontic — to categories like
right, reason, rational, just, and
ought. According to teleological views, of which
classical consequentialism and universalizable egoism are classic
examples, deontic categories are posterior to and to be explained in
terms of evaluative categories like good and good for.
The contrasting view, according to which deontic categories are prior
to, and explain, the evaluative categories, is one which, as Aristotle
says, has no name. But its most important genus is that of
“fitting attitude” accounts, and Scanlon's
“buck-passing” theory is another closely related
contemporary example.

Teleological theories are not, strictly speaking, theories about
value. They are theories about right action, or about what one ought
to do. But they are committed to claims about value, because
they appeal to evaluative facts, in order to explain what is right and
wrong, and what we ought to do — deontic facts. The most
obvious consequence of these theories, is therefore that evaluative
facts must not then be explained in terms of deontic facts. The
evaluative, on such views, is prior to the deontic.

3.1.1 Classical Consequentialism

The most familiar sort of view falling under this umbrella is
classical consequentialism, sometimes called (for reasons we'll
see in section 3.3) “agent-neutral consequentialism”.
According to classical consequentialism, every agent ought always to
do whatever action, out of all of the actions available
to her at that time, is the one such that if she did it, things
would be best.

Classical consequentialism is sometimes supported by appeal to the
intuition that one should always do the best action, and then the
assumption that actions are only instrumentally good or bad —
for the sake of what they lead to. This reasoning is problematic in
two ways: first, it only motivates a very narrow version of
consequentialism, for it is possible to believe that actions have
intrinsic value and still be consequentialist. What is central to
consequentialism is the claim that each agent ought to do the action
which has the feature that things would be best if she did it —
not the action with the feature that things other than the
action would be best if she did it. So if actions themselves
contribute to how good things are, then consequentialists can
agree.

A larger problem for this reasoning is that non-consequentialists can
agree that agents ought always to do the best action. The important
feature of this claim to recognize is that it is a claim not about
intrinsic or instrumental value, but about attributive good. And as
noted in section 2.1, “instrumental” and
“intrinsic” don't really apply to attributive good. Just
as knives are better for being sharper and tents are better for more
effectively keeping out the rain, non-consequentialists can
hold that actions are better for being more supported by reasons. If
what you ought to do is what is most supported by reasons, such a view
can agree that you ought always to do the best action, but not
because it is the best action. You ought to do it because it
is most supported by reasons, and that also makes it the best action.
So the evaluative status of the action is explained in terms of its
deontic status; not conversely.

3.1.2 Problems in Principle vs. Problems of Implementation

Classical consequentialism, and its instantiation in the form of
utilitarianism, has been well-explored, and its
advantages and costs cannot be surveyed here. Many of the issues for
classical consequentialism, however, are issues for details of its
exact formulation or implementation, and not problems in
principle with its appeal to the evaluative in order to explain
the deontic. For example, the worry that consequentialism is too
demanding has been addressed within the consequentialist framework, by
replacing “best” with “good enough” —
substituting a “satisficing” conception for a
“maximizing” one. For another example, problems faced by
certain consequentialist theories, like traditional utilitarianism,
about accounting for things like justice can be solved by other
consequentialist theories, simply by adopting a more generous picture
about what sort of things contribute to how good things are.

In section 3.3 we'll address one of the most central issues about
classical consequentialism: its inability to allow for
agent-centered constraints. This issue does pose an
in-principle general problem for the aspiration of consequentialism to
explain deontic categories in terms of the evaluative. For more, see
the entry on
consequentialism and utilitarianism.

3.1.3 Other Teleological Theories

Universalizable egoism is another familiar teleological theory.
According to universalizable egoism, each agent ought always to do
whatever action has the feature that, of all available alternatives,
it is the one such that, were she to do it, things would be best
for her. Rather than asking agents to maximize the good,
egoism asks agents to maximize what is good for them.
Universalizable egoism shares many features with classical
consequentialism, and Sidgwick found both deeply attractive. Many
others have joined Sidgwick in holding that there is something deeply
attractive about what consequentialism and egoism have in common
— which involves, at minimum, the teleological idea that the
deontic is to be explained in terms of the evaluative.

Of course, not all teleological theories share the broad features of
consequentialism and egoism. Classical Natural Law theories are
teleological, in the sense that they seek to explain what we ought to
do in terms of what is good, but they do so in a very different way
from consequentialism and egoism. According to an example of such a
Natural Law theory, there are a variety of natural values, each of
which calls for a certain kind of distinctive response or respect, and
agents ought always to act in ways that respond to the values with
that kind of respect.
For more on natural law theories, see the entry on
the natural law tradition in ethics.

In contrast to teleological theories, which seek to account for
deontic categories in terms of evaluative ones, Fitting Attitudes
accounts aspire to account for evaluative categories — like good
simpliciter, good for, and attributive good — in
terms of the deontic. Whereas teleology has implications about
value but is not itself a theory primarily about value, but
rather about what is right, Fitting Attitudes accounts are
primarily theses about value — in accounting for it in terms of
the deontic, they tell us what it is for something to be good. Hence,
they are theories about the nature of value.

The basic idea behind all kinds of Fitting Attitudes account is that
“good” is closely linked to “desirable”.
“Desireable”, of course, in contrast to
“visible” and “audible”, which mean
“able to be seen” and “able to be heard”, does
not mean “able to be desired”. It means, rather,
something like “correctly desired” or “appropriately
desired”. If being good just is being desirable, and being
desirable just is being correctly or appropriately desired, it follows
that being good just is being correctly or appropriately desired. But
correct and appropriate are deontic concepts, so if
being good is just being desirable, then goodness can itself be
accounted for in terms of the deontic. And that is the basic idea
behind Fitting Attitudes accounts.

3.2.1 Two Fitting Attitudes Accounts

Different Fitting Attitudes accounts, however, work by appealing to
different deontic concepts. Some of the problems facing Fitting
Attitudes views can be exhibited by considering a couple exemplars of
such a view. According to a formula from Sidgwick, for example, the
good is what ought to be desired. But this slogan is not by itself
very helpful until we know more: desired by whom? By everyone? By at
least someone? By someone in particular? And for which of our senses
of “good” does this seek to provide an account? Is it an
account of good
simpliciter, saying that it would be good if p just in
case ____ ought to desire that p, where “____” is
filled in by whoever it is, who is supposed to have the desire? Or is
it an account of “value” claims, saying that pleasure is
good just in case pleasure ought to be desired by ____?

The former of these two accounts would fit in with the
“good-first” theory from section 1.1.4; the latter would
fit in with the “value-first” theory. We observed in
section 1.1.4 that “value” claims don't admit of
comparatives in the same way that other uses of “good” do;
this is important here because if “better” simpliciter is
prior to “good” simpliciter, then strictly speaking a
“good-first” theorist needs to offer a Fitting Attitudes
account of “better”, rather than of “good”.
Such a modification of the Sidgwickian slogan might say that it would
be better if p than if q just in case ____ ought to
desire that p more than that q (or alternatively, to
prefer p to q).

In What We Owe to Each Other, T.M. Scanlon offers an
influential contemporary view with much in common with Fitting Attitudes accounts, which
he called the Buck-Passing theory of value. According to
Scanlon's slogan, “to call something valuable is to say that it
has other properties that provide reasons for behaving in certain ways
with respect to it.” One important difference from Sidgwick's
view is that it appeals to a different deontic concept: reasons
instead of ought. But it also aspires to be more neutral than
Sidgwick's slogan on the specific response that is called for.
Sidgwick's slogan required that it is desire that is always
relevant, whereas Scanlon's slogan leaves open that there may be
different “certain ways” of responding to different kinds
of values.

But despite these differences, the Scanlonian slogan shares with the
Sidgwickian slogan the feature of being massively underspecified. For
which sense of “good” does it aspire to provide an
account? Is it really supposed to be directly an account of
“good”, or, if we respect the priority of
“better” to “good”, should we really try to
understand it as, at bottom, an account of “better than”?
And crucially, which are the “certain ways” that are
involved? It can't just be that the speaker has to have some certain
ways in mind, because there are some ways of responding such that
reasons to respond in that way are evidence that the thing in question
is bad rather than that it is good — for example, the
attitude of dread. So does the theory require that there is
some particular set of certain ways, such that a thing is good just in
case there are reasons to respond to it in any of those ways?
Scanlon's initial remarks suggest rather that for each sort of thing,
there are different “certain ways” such that when we say
that that thing is good, we are saying that there are reasons
to respond to it in those ways. This is a matter that would need to
be sorted out by any worked out view.

A further complication with the Scanlonian formula, is that appealing
in the analysis to the bare existential claim that there are
reasons to respond to something in one of these “certain
ways” faces large difficulties. Suppose, for example, that
there is some reason to respond in one of the “certain
ways”, but there are competing, and weightier, reasons not to,
so that all things considered, responding in any of the “certain
ways” would be a mistake. Plausibly, the thing under
consideration should not turn out to be good in such a case. So even
a view like Scanlon's, which appeals to reasons, may need, once it is
more fully developed, to appeal to specific claims about the
weight of those reasons.

3.2.2 The Wrong Kind of Reason

Even once these kinds of questions are sorted out, however, other
significant questions remain. For example, one of the famous problems
facing such views is the Wrong Kind of Reasons problem. The
problem arises from the observation that intuitively, some factors can
affect what you ought to desire without affecting what is good. It
may be true that if we make something better, then other things being
equal, you ought to desire it more. But we can also
create incentives for you to desire it, without making it any
better. For example, you might be offered a substantial financial
reward for desiring something bad, or an evil demon might (credibly)
threaten to kill your family unless you do so. If these kinds of
circumstances can affect what you ought to desire, as is at least
intuitively plausible, then they will be counterexamples to views
based on the Sidgwickian formula. Similarly, if these kinds of
circumstances can give you reasons to desire the thing which is
bad, then they will be counterexamples to views based on the
Scanlonian formula. It is in the context of the Scanlonian formula
that this issue has been called the “Wrong Kind of
Reasons” problem, because if these circumstances do give you
reasons to desire the thing that is bad, they are reasons of the wrong
kind to figure in a Scanlon-style account of what it is to be
good.

This issue has recently been the topic of much fruitful investigation,
and investigators have drawn parallels between the kinds of reason to
desire that are provided by these kinds of “external”
incentives and familiar issues about pragmatic reasons for belief and
the kind of reason to intend that exists in Gregory Kavka's Toxin
Puzzle. Focusing on the cases of desire, belief, and intention, which
are all kinds of mental state, some have claimed that the distinction
between the “right kind” and “wrong kind” of
reason can be drawn on the basis of the distinction between
“object-given” reasons, which refer to the object of the
attitude, and “state-given” reasons, which refer to the
mental state itself, rather than to its object. But questions have
also been raised about whether the
“object-given”/“state-given” distinction is
general enough to really explain the distinction between reasons of
the right kind and reasons of the wrong kind, and it has even been
disputed whether the distinction tracks anything at all.

One reason to think that the distinction may not be general enough, is
that situations very much like Wrong Kind of Reasons situations can
arise even where no mental states are in play. For example, games are
subject to norms of correctness. External incentives to cheat —
for example, a credible threat from an evil demon that she will kill
your family unless you do so — can plausibly not only provide
you with reasons to cheat, but make it the case that you ought to.
But just as such external incentives don't make it appropriate or
correct to desire something bad, they don't make it a correct move of
the game to cheat. If this is right, and the right kind/wrong kind
distinction among reasons really does arise in a broad spectrum of
cases, including ones like this one, it is not likely that a
distinction that only applies to reasons for mental states is going to
lie at the bottom of it.

3.2.3 Solving the Problem

Even once a successful classification of reasons of the
“right” and “wrong” kinds has been given,
however, a further move is needed in order actually to solve the Wrong
Kind of Reasons problem for Fitting Attitudes accounts. At least
three different strategies have developed for doing so. (1) The first
is to deny that external incentives like those which create the
problem can actually affect what you ought to desire, at all —
or put in terms of reasons, to deny that reasons of the “wrong
kind” are really reasons to desire at all. (2) According to a
second approach, Fitting Attitudes accounts should not appeal to the
notion of “ought” or “reason” at all, but
rather to some other deontic concept, for which we won't be able to
reconstruct the problem. Candidate proposals include the notion of
the “fitting” (whence “Fitting Attitudes”) or
“appropriate”, and the concept of correctness. (3) And
according to yet a third approach, the problem should ultimately be
addressed by being more careful about the question of who the
Fitting Attitudes account says ought to, or has a reason to, have the
requisite desire, or about what explains this reason.

for further discussion of these three strategies to solve the Wrong
Kind of Reasons problem.

Independently of the prospects for any particular solution, however,
Fitting Attitudes theorists can appeal to arguments for optimism that
this problem must have some solution. After all, the
basic idea behind the Fitting Attitudes approach is that
“good” is like “desirable”. But it is highly
plausible that “desirable” means something like
“fittingly or correctly desired” — after all,
desirability is a normative, not a merely descriptive, characteristic,
and it has something to do with desire. So there must
be some deontic category which we can compose with
“desire”, “admire”, and “detest”
in order to yield notions like that of the desirable, the admirable,
and the detestable, without fear of reasons of the wrong kind.
Whatever that deontic category is, it will do for the Fitting
Attitudes analysis of “good”.

3.2.4 Application to the Varieties of Goodness

One significant attraction to Fitting Attitudes-style accounts, is
that they offer prospects of being successfully applied to attributive
good and good for, as well as to good simpliciter. Just
as reasons to prefer one state of affairs to another can underwrite
one state of affairs being better than another, reasons to choose one
can-opener over another can underwrite its being a better can opener
than the other, and reasons to prefer some state of affairs for
someone's sake can underwrite its being better for that person
than another. For example, here is a quick sketch of what an account
might look like, which accepts the good-first theory from section
1.1.4, holds as in section 1.1.2 that good simpliciter is a
special case of attributive good, and understands attributive
“good” in terms of attributive “better” and
“good for” in terms of “better for”:

Attributive better: For all kinds K, and things
A and B, for A to be a better K
than B is for the set of all of the right kind of reasons to
choose A over B when selecting a K to be
weightier than the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose
B over A when selecting a K.

Better for: For all things A, B, and
C, A is better for C than B is
just in case the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose
A over B on C's behalf is weightier than
the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose B over
A on C's behalf.

If being a good K is just being a better K than most (in some
comparison class), and “it would be good if p” just
means that p‘s obtaining is a good state of affairs, and
value claims like “pleasure is good” just mean that other
things being equal, it is better for there to be more pleasure, then
this pair of accounts has the right structure to account for the full
range of “good” claims that we have encountered. But it
also shows how the various senses of “good” are related,
and allows that even attributive good and good for have, at
bottom, a common shared structure. So the prospect of being able to
offer such a unified story about what the various senses of
“good” have in common, though not the exclusive property
of the Fitting Attitudes approach, is nevertheless one of its
attractions.

3.3.1 Agent-Centered Constraints

The most central, in-principle problem for classical
consequentialism is the possibility of what are called
agent-centered constraints. It has long been a traditional
objection to utilitarian theories that because they place no intrinsic
disvalue on wrong actions like murder, they yield the prediction that
if you have a choice between murdering and allowing two people to die,
it is clear that you should murder. After all, other things being
equal, the situation is stacked 2-to-1 — there are two deaths on
one side, but only one death on the other, and each death is equally
bad.

Consequentialists who hold that killings of innocents are
intrinsically bad can avoid this prediction. As long as a murder is
at least twice as bad as an ordinary death not by murder,
consequentialists can explain why you ought not to murder, even in
order to prevent two deaths. So there is no in-principle problem for
consequentialism posed by this sort of example; whether it is an issue
for a given consequentialist depends on her axiology: on what she
thinks is intrinsically bad, and how bad she thinks it is.

But the problem is very closely related to a genuine problem for
consequentialism. What if you could prevent two murders by murdering?
Postulating an intrinsic disvalue to murders does nothing to account
for the intuition that you still ought not to murder, even in this
case. But most people find it pre-theoretically natural to assume
that even if you should murder in order to prevent thousands of
murders, you shouldn't do it in order to prevent just two. The
constraint against murdering, on this natural intuition, goes beyond
the idea that murders are bad. It requires that the badness of your
own murders affects what you should do more than it affects what
others should do in order to prevent you from murdering. That is why
it is called “agent-centered”.

3.3.2 Agent-Relative Value

The problem with agent-centered constraints is that there seems to be no single natural
way of evaluating outcomes that yields all of the right predictions.
For each agent, there is some way of evaluating outcomes that yields
the right predictions about what she ought to do, but these rankings
treat that agent's murders as contributing more to the badness of
outcomes than other agents' murders. So as a result, an
incompatible ranking of outcomes appears to be required in
order to yield the right predictions about what some other agent ought
to do — namely, one which rates his murders as
contributing more to the badness of outcomes than the first agent's
murders. (Though see Oddie and Milne [1991] and Wedgwood [2009] for
important dissenting opinions.)

As a result of this observation, philosophers have postulated a thing
called agent-relative value. The idea of agent-relative value
is that if the better than relation is relativized to
agents, then outcomes in which Franz murders can be
worse-relative-to Franz than outcomes in which Jens murders,
even though outcomes in which Jens murders are worse-relative-to Jens
than outcomes in which Franz murders. These contrasting rankings of
these two kinds of outcomes are not incompatible, because each is
relativized to a different agent — the former to Franz, and the
latter to Jens.

The idea of agent-relative value is attractive to teleologists,
because it allows a view that is very similar in structure to
classical consequentialism to account for constraints. According to
this view, sometimes called Agent-Relative Teleology or
Agent-Centered Consequentialism, each agent ought always to do
what will bring about the results that are best-relative-to her. Such
a view can easily accommodate an agent-centered constraint not to
murder, on the assumption that each agent's murders are sufficiently
worse-relative-to her than other agent's murders are.

Some philosophers have claimed that Agent-Relative Teleology is not
even a distinct theory from classical consequentialism, holding that
the word “good” in English picks out agent-relative value
in a context-dependent way, so that when consequentialists say,
“everyone ought to do what will have the best results”,
what they are really saying is that “everyone ought to do what
will have the best-relative-to-her results”. And other
philosophers have suggested that Agent-Relative Teleology is such an
attractive theory that everyone is really committed to it. These
thesis are bold claims in the theory of value, because they tell us
strong and surprising things about the nature of what we are talking
about, when we use the word, “good”.

3.3.3 Problems and Prospects

In fact, it is highly controversial whether there is even such a thing
as agent-relative value in the first place. Agent-Relative
Teleologists typically appeal to a distinction between agent-relative
and agent-neutral value, but others have contested that no one has
ever successfully made such a distinction in a theory-neutral way.
Moreover, even if there is such a distinction, relativizing
“good” to agents is not sufficient to deal with all
intuitive cases of constraints, because common sense allows that you
ought not to murder, even in order to prevent yourself from
murdering twice in the future. In order to deal with such cases,
“good” will need to be relativized not just to agents, but
to times. Yet a further source of difficulties arises for
views according to which “good” in English is used to make
claims about agent-relative value in a context-dependent way; such
views fail ordinary tests for context-dependence, and don't always
generate the readings of sentences which their proponents require.

One of the motivations for thinking that there must be such a thing as
agent-relative value comes from proponents of Fitting Attitudes
accounts of value, and goes like this: if the good is what ought to be
desired, then there will be two kinds of good. What ought to
be desired by everyone will be the “agent-neutral” good,
and what ought to be desired by some particular person will be the
good relative-to that person. Ancestors of this idea can be found in
Sidgwick and Ewing, and it has found a number of contemporary
proponents. Whether it is right will turn not only on whether Fitting
Attitudes accounts turn out to be correct, but on what role the answer
to the questions, “who ought?” or “whose
reasons?” plays in the shape of an adequate Fitting Attitudes
account. All of these issues remain unresolved.

The questions of whether there is such a thing as agent-relative
value, and if so, what role it might play in an agent-centered variant
on classical consequentialism, are at the heart of the debate between
consequentialists and deontologists, and over the fundamental question
of the relative priority of the evaluative versus the deontic. These
are large and open questions, but as I hope I've illustrated here,
they are intimately interconnected with a very wide range of both
traditional and non-traditional questions in the theory of value,
broadly construed.

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from 1997 to 2007.
Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to neh50@neh.gov.